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Overview

The Baerlocher group is one of the world’s leading providers of plastic additives. Founded in 1823, the company now has 16 production sites around the world to serve customers with a wide range of additives for polymers. Baerlocher makes continuous enhancements through R&D, exploring new raw materials and identifying best practices in terms of application, end use, environmental impact and sustainability.

Challenge

The search for video conferencing for Baerlocher started with a need to expand into new production facilities. The organizational challenges of onboarding new employees at these sites resulted in a lot of unnecessary and costly business trips. Employees wanted to participate in company-wide meetings without having to be on site and knew they could find something better than legacy audio-only conference calls. As a manufacturing organization, Baerlocher needed a solution that was capable of sharing fine levels of detail in presentations and documents and wanted to show participants on screen to add the benefits of nonverbal communication in meetings.

Solution

A live product demonstration delivered by a Lifesize channel partner made the decision an easy one. The service was quickly up and running, and because Lifesize is built on a global cloud infrastructure, network load was easy to calculate and plan for.

Baerlocher

“We were hugely impressed with the partners’ expertise and that everything was provided, set up and implemented so quickly because we wanted to avoid a large-scale internal implementation project.”

— Heinz Leyk, Head of IT at Baerlocher

After initially deploying 25 individual user licenses and equipping 14 conference rooms with Lifesize video systems, the organization quickly upgraded their subscription to add 10x the number of user accounts to keep up with employee requests.

“The demand for the desktop version of Lifesize has considerably increased, so the scalability and flexibility of the solution is a real plus. We are extremely pleased with our chosen solution.”

Outcome

A mix of business unit heads, global production managers, sales and HR teams, and procurement and applications departments now all use Lifesize. The company’s management team no longer needs to travel for meetings and can meet face to face with just a click of a button.

“Using Lifesize has streamlined our organization. To fulfill our mission to ‘think global, act local,’ a good connection to all of our communication partners is necessary — video communication makes this a reality.”

The Baerlocher group now also conducts video calls with customers and partners through the Lifesize app, enabling business contacts to quickly and easily join meetings with just a link.

“We have better contact with our colleagues, project work is more efficient, and the number of emails has been reduced, all thanks to video.”